The Zend Engine stores two data points "gc_runs" (Number of gc runs) and "collected" (total number of collected roots) both of which are not exposed to userland and could provide a simple way for debugging tools to get a rough experience of what the GC is doing.

I propose to add two functions to expose this information:

xdebug_get_gc_run_count(): int
xdebug_get_gc_total_collected_roots(): int